“This is an ancient pose for progressives who insist that governing is a science. There’s no right-wing or left-wing way to build a bridge, only the best way. So it is with government too. It (is) more comforting for people to feel as if disinterested technicians, not party hacks, (are) going to be running the show.”

‘I’m not a particularly ideological person,” President Obama told an audience of donors in Seattle over the weekend. He added (in Reuters’s words) that “pragmatism was necessary to advance the values that were important to him.”

This is an old refrain of Obama’s. As he said in his first inaugural, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

“What works” is a cruel standard for the author of Obamacare, which may be one reason the White House has taken to scrubbing the sobriquet from its website and the president’s speeches in favor of the law’s official name, the Affordable Care Act…

This is an ancient pose for progressives who insist that governing is a science. There’s no right-wing or left-wing way to build a bridge, only the best way. So it is with government too.

As The New Republic’s Franklin Foer notes, this fiction was always partly intended to sell voters on the idea that progressive social planners could be trusted with unprecedented state power. “It was more comforting for people to feel as if disinterested technicians, not party hacks, were going to be running the show.”

The irony for Obama is that he’s great at playing the role of disinterested technician, but he’s anything but one in real life. He can talk a great game about providing a website that works like Kayak or Amazon, but he’s embarrassingly out of his depth when it comes to delivering one.